🤔 Reflections on test infrastructure, with a twist of user empathy.

When working on Selenium tests, do you appreciate a traditional IDE-based approach to debugging, with a GUI that lets you set breakpoints, step through your code line-by-line, inspect variables, and evaluate expressions on the fly?

1. Set up a scratch environment and install the selenium package

This post documents how to set up an Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit machine with everything you need to develop automated tests with Selenium-WebDriver, Google Chrome, and ChromeDriver, using the Python 2.7 release that ships with Ubuntu.

These steps might be useful to someone in the near term, and perhaps ...

While working on a stackoverflow answer about Sikuli today, I noted that installing Sikuli on Ubuntu 12.04 isn't a one-step process - there are a few dependencies that need manual intervention before you even install it.

For instructional purposes (either when experimenting on your own, or when demonstrating code to others) it's always useful to be able to run snippets of code in a REPL, or a similar environment allowing fast turnaround in the edit/compile/run cycle.